ikariamfandomcom-20200222-history
Pillaging
This page has incorrect information in relation to version 0.3.0 and needs updating Pillaging (or plundering or raiding) is the process of attacking another town in order to steal some of their resources. The basics Building units In order to attack, you must first have built some units. In the early game, these would be Slingers. As you advance through the Military tech tree, the units become more advanced and far superior in combat. The more units you have, the more it will cost for upkeep. Upkeep is the cost of each unit to stay under your command per hour. In order to build units or even to borrow some from another town, you must first have a barracks. This is available to build from the very beginning and doesn't require research. Costing only 35 wood, the barracks is an essential early game building required for defense and offense. Once the Barracks is built, you can click on it to bring up the Units menu. You will only see the option to build Slingers, which will cost 40 wood each. As long as you have 40 wood, you can create your first unit by typing 1 into the box above the Recruit button. After this, the slinger will start to be trained - in a while, the slinger will be ready. Attack preparations Slingers are very weak. In order to use them and successfully pillage, you're going to have to train at least 2 of them. This is because the town hall offers some defense—while you won't see it on the combat report, it's there. The attack In order to attack, you need to be in the island view. You can then click on the target town and a toolbar will appear to the left of the screen. The toolbar will have an option to pillage the town. Select this to activate the Pillage preparation screen. Select 2+ slingers and then press Pillage Town. On the same island, it will take about 1 hour for the attack to reach the town, loot it and come home. "It is prefered to have more army to attack, you will face enormous financial penalties. As a result, you have to see the opponent's military score...If it is 100 or less, you can pillage people with 3 slingers, and of course, the opponent's score should be more than 300 because if it is less, loot will return as really small amount. Required to have 3 transport ships to get more than 1K+ of goods." - Says Servent of KhamulBrsrk. Again, your soldiers will need a cargo ship, even on the same island. If you only have one ship and your soldiers are pillaging, don't send your seemingly available ship off to trade. You cannot pillage while another player has their city blockaded. Your ships are turned around just as if the city had a defending naval force. However, when your target has a local fleet, you can pillage on the same island but a troopship from another island gets turned away. It has been discovered that two attacking armies attacking the same city at the same time do not fight with one another. Each conducts its attack individually and pillages in accordance to the order they attack. If you have a military treaty, then your attack will be coordinated together. The battle report The attacker sees only the last round of the battle. This makes the report a little confusing. Don't worry, you are shown how many units you lose - unless you lose all of them, in which case, you will get a blank report (except that it may show what troops the defender retains) and you lose combat. Since you are using slingers at this point, you can always expect to lose at least one. The important bit is knowing if you won and how many troops you lost. Loot The amount of Loot you get is decided by the number of trade ships you have available. The loading time is not dependent on the port of destination, but on the amount of transporters. Everyone can load 15 goods per minute. You cannot pillage gold any more, only goods! You have 20-minute window. This is why you may get 300 resources per attack. You may get less if they have a large warehouse and very few unprotected resources. Note that you always use at least one trade ship when you pillage; this is to carry the troops to the destination if it is on a different island but to be in readiness if the troops go overland. The type of resources you get is proportional to the total number of resources they have. For instance, if you pillage a town with a size 2 trade port and they have 1000 Wood and 500 Marble (a 2:1 ratio), you will pillage 400 Wood and 200 Marble (the 2:1 ratio). One thing to note as a defender the resources you have in transit are suscepitble to looting, I would consier this a bug, but as of 0.30 it is the current status. Advanced techniques As you progress through the game, new units will appear. Wine and sulphur are both essential for a raider: * Wine allows your city to grow faster and as a result support more units (once you have Viticulture) * Sulphur allows for more advanced units such as the swordsman or phalanx, as well as being necessary for all naval war vessels except the diving boat. Quick attacks (aka Wave pillaging) It has been the writer's experience that if you send a force to fight, a second force can drop in, pillage, and immediately leave again. So if you send 20 slingers, you will get 1 large battle where it takes normal time. However, if you send 10 slingers, then 5, then 5 again (all within a few seconds or minutes of each other) you will get 1 large battle where rounds take 20 minutes, and 2 smaller battles where rounds take 1 second. Each battle will pillage, loot, travel and use action points separately, however you will save a lot of time. Also when an attacker joins an attack it only creates one combat report regardless of how many different groups join. A friend reported this ocurrance, "I sent one attack, and another one after 5 minutes. The first one was loading 4 ships of wood, I saw them load in ship screen. After 5 minutes, the second attack arrived and the 4 ships of wood just vanished. They returned empty. The second attack worked fine though, it got me 600 wood." New units Shortly after Wealth, you should have researched Professional Army (some will say Viticulture should be researched first but it's up to you). Professional Army will allow you to build swordsmen and phalanxes once the Barracks is at a high enough level. You should then use phalanxes for defense (and maybe attacking, if needed) and swordsmen for attacking. 1 swordsman can usually take an undefended city (without loss), whereas with slingers you can always expect to lose 1. If a single swordsman fails to take an undefended town (seems to happen with higher level towns), a better unit such as a phalanx is required. And you may finally just wanna send steam giants!! Blockading As trade opens up, it becomes advisable to blockade ports before attacking. There are multiple reasons for this: * Emergence of fleets - With the emergence of fleets, your units can't be sure of reaching the opponent's town as the harbour may be guarded by war vessels which will turn away your trade ships, carrying your troops. Moreover, war vessels in the harbour can block your trade ships from reaching the town in order to carry the loot away. * Resource saving with trade ships - With trade now blooming, people will have trade ships of their own to carry resources with. Annoyingly these can be loaded up and sent off to another location to avoid the attack and then recalled. However if you blockade the harbour before the tradeships are sent, the trade ships can't get out of the city and the resources are trapped there as your ground troops come in to attack. Blockades work in the same way as attacking - simply choose the target town and, as long as you have some war ships, you may blockade the enemy's harbour. If the enemy has a fleet of its own, then the fleet may engage your own. If this happens, you will get a sea battle - if you win you will then control their harbour and your trade ships can get through without a problem. Blockades can be broken however by a foreign fleet wishing to aid the blockaded town, or even a fleet from the town itself. If the relieving fleet is stronger than your own, it will defeat and sink some, if not all, of your ships in the process of freeing the harbour. For this reason, it is best to arrive with ground troops 5 minutes after the blockading fleet arrives. This narrows the amount of time that your fleet might be attacked by a foreign fleet whilst your troops are still in the city. Also see the Common Ship Questions article. Colonies With the advance of Expansion, colonies can and will be built. These colonies mean that it is much harder to judge whether there are troops in the city than before. This is because the colony owner will appear on the high scores as a single item and his armies could be spread between both towns or just in his main. Until the advance of espionage (see below), it becomes more important (despite the maintenance cost) to attack with overwhelming odds, just to be sure that you will break the defense of the city. Espionage With the advance of Espionage you gain the ability of Spying on your enemies. * Show you the city view of the other players town - this includes the levels of all buildings including the trade port * Find out how many resources are in the city * Find out how many units, war machines, and war ships are in the city * Track fleet movement - also shows which units are on the ships * Find out how much gold is in the treasury * Find out what the last research was * Monitor messages - allows you to see the subject, not content * Find out if the player is online Of the spies' activities, only a few are necessary for raiding, the others are useful and interesting, but not need to know. Knowing the value of the barracks, shipyard, and trade port will tell you what type of units and ships you can expect to face as well as how much loot you can expect. How many units in the town will allow you to send adequate force to get it (though it may be less if someone else gets there first), as well as this you can take into account the defense bonus you can expect from the wall level. Finding out how many resources are in the city as well as the warehouse level will tell you how many resources are available for looting. These aren't essential to attacking, merely useful, and if your spy dies whilst attempting the mission don't worry too much. It is only a game so send as many troops as you think you need, the worst that can happen is that you have to rebuild. Mobile Colonies Placing a "Mobile Colony" is where you set up a temporary colony on the same island of someone that you want to attack. You then move in your troops to that island, and attack the desired town. Since it is an attack from the same island, the navy is ignored and it counts as a ground attack. Once you have sufficiently pillaged everyone on the island that you desire, you move out of the temporary colony and set it up somewhere else. Hence, the colony "floats" around. A colony placed according to this tactic is also known as a mobile war colony, hence the oft-seen acronym MWC. The standard defense against this tactic would be to blockade the Mobile Colony so that the enemy can't move in or out. Also, you could pillage the player's other towns to draw attention away, and even set up a floater of your own. Other notes It has been discovered that two attacking armies attacking the same city at the same time do not fight with one another. Each conducts its attack individually and pillages in accordance to the order they attack. :This has been corrected in v.0.2.8. If you have a military treaty, then your attack will be coordinated together. Defence Against Looting --First off you should send out spies to see what your up against. Depending on how much resources and units your opponent has, you should have about 75% as much.(if you have a town wall of lvl5+). with the added defensive bonuses you should be able to easily evade attacks. Obbynova00's tips4: Warfare Defense- Really upgrade town wall, phalanx, and rams. Offense- Get archers and gunsmen/marksmen or any, but especially with the proper research (Birds flight) Defense Strategy- If you see someone coming in with a pillage, protect your goods (if you see the attack coming: Send them away (if not blockaded, use them up or whatever. Send in troops and fleets from other towns to help the town in question if you see it coming. (which I'm not suggesting) Offense startegy- First send a spy to look at the size of their barracks/shipyard may tell you their power, but dont go by that since a level 1 barracks can still have catapults, phalnx, and etc. since the troops can be deployed. If you are able, spy their garrison to see if your challenge is to much...lol. Next make sure they don't have a navy, if they do, make sure you blockade first or your pilage will be 100% unsuccessful.Mkae your blockade and pillage close together in time (back to back) since they will get a chance to defeat your ships. Make sure you take a look at their town wall size since that will knock down your offence too if you underestimate it. Like you may laugh at a guy with no fleets or units, so you send limited troops becuase you have nothing to fight, but their town wall is level 22 so it kills your troops. Sorry about spelling... not the best. Category:Guides